Making Women’s Histories

Beyond National Perspectives

Pamela S. Nadell

Publication Year: 2013

Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women&#8217;s history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women&#8217;s and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women&#8217;s and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future?

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The contributors discuss their discovery of women&#8217;s histories,the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women&#8217;s and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women&#8217;s histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Writing Women’s History across Time and Space: Introduction

“My commitment to women’s history came out of my life, not out of my
head,” wrote the pioneering historian Gerda Lerner. As a graduate student,
Lerner had encountered “a world of ‘significant knowledge,’” in which women
seemed not to exist.1 She dedicated her career to the project of remaking that
body of knowledge, demanding that it include the lives and experiences of...

IMAGINING NEW HISTORIES: LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRAJECTORIES

1. Women’s Past and the Currents of U.S. History

Less than half a century ago, the subject of women and gender barely registered
in the scholarship and teaching of American historians. In remarkably
short order, uncovering women’s past became a political imperative and
intellectual passion, and then emerged as a legitimate area of professional
inquiry and research. With some distance from its origins, it is now possible...

2. New Directions in Russian and Soviet Women’s History

A product of second-wave feminism, in the United States the field of Russian
and Soviet women’s history was also born under another and very different
political star: the Cold War. For students of the imperial and modern periods
of Russia’s history, if not of earlier times, the impact of the Cold War was enormous,
lingering even after 1991 and the end of the geopolitical divisions from
which it had arisen. Only in the past ten or fifteen years have historians in the...

3. Putting the Political in Economy: African Women’s and Gender History, 1992–2010

In the mid-1980s, my historiographical survey of scholarly works on African
women revealed a focus on political economy, with emphases on women’s
highly productive and important economic activities and women’s agency,
moving away from the tendency either to ignore women entirely or treat them
as passive victims. These attempts to rectify the gaps in the literature rebutted
the stereotypical oversexualization of black women by whites and the related...

4. Sexual Crises, Women’s History, and the History of Sexuality in Europe

In 1916, Austrian feminist Grete Meisel-Hess proclaimed that a “sexual crisis”
afflicted contemporary society. Sexual fulfillment was necessary for both men
and women, she argued, but the capitalist order and men’s selfishness prevented
its flourishing, locking women into unhappy marriages or the sexless
misery of spinsterhood.1 Expanding on Meisel-Hess, I define a sexual crisis as...

ENGENDERING NATIONAL AND NATIONALIST PROJECTS

5. Gender and the Politics of Exceptionalism in the Writing of British Women’s History

In 1793, a Norfolk surgeon named Richard Dinmore published the controversial
tract, A Brief Account of the Moral and Political Acts of the Kings and
Queens of England from William the Conqueror to the Revolution in the Year
1688. A political radical with close ties to “Jacobin” circles in nearby Norwich,
Dinmore revisited the history of the reigning kings and queens of England in
order to underscore the need for parliamentary reform. Dinmore was particularly
interested in chronicling the history...

6. Amateur Historians, the “Woman Question,” and the Production of Modern History in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Egypt

Egyptian women only recently played critical roles in the eighteen days of
protests that toppled Mohammed Husni Mubarak’s thirty-year presidency
on February 11, 2011.1 Photographs of the demonstrations revealed women
marching in the streets, confronting both the military and the Egyptian riot
police, and tending to the sick and wounded in Tahrir Square. Similarly,
video clips, recorded and released just prior to the outbreak...

7. Women’s and Gender History in Modern India: Researching the Past, Reflecting on the Present

One might argue that historians always write, Janus-faced, with a view
toward both the past and the present. Certainly, attention to these dual temporalities—
to both the historical past and the contemporary context—helps
us to understand the trajectories of research in Indian women’s history from
its professionalization in the 1970s and 1980s onward. Questions about the
postcolonial present, most specifically about the ongoing oppression of...

EXPLORING TRANSNATIONAL APPROACHES

8. World History Meets History of Masculinity in Latin American Studies

A transnational turn is certainly afoot in the discipline of history. While
world history as a field is hardly new, it has usually played second-fiddle
to the histories of particular nation-states and the regions carved out by
area studies. But recently almost every national history field and regional
field has recognized the need for a gaze that looks across hallowed borders
and oceans with fresh eyes.2 As the forces of globalization...

9. Connecting Histories of Gender, Health, and U.S.-China Relations

Like other historical fields, especially those deeply engaged with politics, the
study of U.S. foreign relations came late to incorporate a gendered perspective.
Eventually, new scholarship on women’s and gender history affected its
historiography, as scholars repositioned a field traditionally concerned with
masculine narratives of nationalism, military interventions, and diplomacy...

10. A Happier Marriage? Feminist History Takes the Transnational Turn

Three decades ago, the feminist economist Heidi Hartmann quipped that the
marriage of Marxism and feminism had been “like the marriage of husband
and wife depicted in English common law: Marxism and feminism are one,
and that one is Marxism.”1 Hartmann called for a “more progressive union”
that recognized capitalist structures and patriarchal inequalities. Since then,
Marxist and feminist studies have both changed...

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